Several Times The Doctor Couldn't Say It
by Luna Lovegood5
Summary: Telling someone you love them is harder than it first seems. Slightly cracky fluff that completely ignores Journey's End. TenxRose.


**Several Times The Doctor Couldn't Say It (and, er, several more times he still couldn't)**

**Disclaimer:** Nothing is mine.

--

The first time he tells her, it's just an ordinary day. They'd been separated for hours and now, back in the TARDIS, she's snuggled up with him on the captain's seat in the console room and he just blurts it out into her hair.

She sits up straight, thinking she hasn't heard him right. Maybe it was _I glove you_. You never know with the Doctor.

"What did you just say?"

The Doctor blinks and repeats himself, half-expecting the TARDIS alarms to burst into life or the entire surface of Mercury to ignite. There's a reason he hasn't said it in such a long time.

Rose stands up and backs away a few steps, never taking her eyes off him. It's been a risk telling her, he knows that, but he never expected a reaction quite like this. This is more than, "I'm sorry, I don't love you" or "What were you thinking, you crazy alien? Take me home". She's reaching for the broom he keeps under the console, for Rassilon's sake. He stands up himself, decidedly alarmed.

"Alright, out with it. Where's the Doctor? What've you done to him?!"

The Doctor is suddenly struck with how wrong it is that he has never verbalised his feelings before. He'd always suspected she knew, that she didn't need to hear it, but for the words to be so unexpected that she thinks he's been _possessed_? Does he really seem that incapable of expressing human emotion?

Still, perhaps it's only a natural supposition when their first kiss (to Rose's memory, at least) only happened because she'd been taken over by a boneless bag of plastic-surgery obsessed insanity and they have, after all, just been reunited after hours of separation on a planet full of mind-controlling caterpillars.

He takes a step closer to her, hand outstretched. Obviously, hours of being slithered and slimed over have taken their toll. "Rose, really, it's me. I – "

"I'm warning you, don't come any closer!" She shifts her position slightly so that she's steadier on her feet, hoisting the broom into the air like it's a weapon. "I swear, if you turn green and start slobbering all over me again, I'll – well, I dunno what I'll do, but I think of something. Just tell me what you've done to him and I'll put the broom down."

The Doctor laughs. _That _was a mistake. Rose steps forward and jabs at him with the broom, rapidly losing her balance when the TARDIS rocks through a particularly tricky bit of the vortex. He grabs the broom, hoping she'll still have a hold of the other end, but she goes flying into the console and hits her head on a particularly nasty lever.

When she comes around an hour later, the last thing she remembers is visiting Captain Jack a week before. Perhaps it's best.

--

It's hard to build up the courage to say it again after that. One day, reasoning that English has failed him and wanting to tell her in his own language, he switches the translation circuits in the TARDIS off and tells her over the mug of tea she hands him.

"Bless you," she says, feeling his forehead with concern. "Are you sick?"

Perhaps it was a little too much to expect her to understand Gallifreyan.

It's not all bad, though, he supposes, an hour or two later when she's tucked up in his bed feeding him chicken soup.

--

They have a fight, the first one since she came back to him across the Void.

Rose wants to stay. The Doctor needs her to stay but thinks she should go home, back to Pete's World where it's safe. He knows neither of them could handle losing each other once more, and if it happens again he might not be able to wring the two-minute goodbye the universe gave them last time.

He wants her here whatever he says, she knows it. She calls him a hypocrite; he's barely left her side since those first few disbelieving moments. She proves her point – and his, if he'll only admit it – by leaving his.

It takes the Doctor over an hour to track her down. He's in the middle of racing up and down a London high street, hands shoved frustratedly into his hair, when he stops, quite by chance, right outside the window of a café she's calmly sitting in with Donna, Martha and Jack.

He taps on the glass. She ignores him. He knocks, louder. Donna looks up and then quickly pretends she hasn't, stirring her tea with exaggerated interest. Jack smirks and Martha keeps her head bent determinedly down towards her tea, eyes flickering over to the window.

Ten minutes later, after trying to get in but getting thrown out for shouting across to Rose and disturbing the other customers, the Doctor has eventually resorted to jumping up and down and waving madly from the other side of the window. Now the entire street is watching him, not to mention the old couple and the young students drinking tea inside the café. A passing Londoner drops a handful of coppers by his feet.

Rose's cheeks are faintly pink but she's still looking stubbornly in the other direction and trying to maintain a conversation with Jack, who is blatantly not paying attention but staring out of the window in amusement instead. Donna, who has clearly tired of laughing at them all, nudges Rose and nods over to the glass, and the younger blonde reluctantly, _finally_, turns her head in the Doctor's direction.

Well, then. That's a start.

Without really thinking about it, he whips out his psychic paper and presses it to the window. Martha squints as words starts to form, then realises they're meant for Rose and quickly looks back at her tea again.

_I'm sorry. _

The message reforms.

_I do want you to stay. I really, really do._

Rose folds her arms triumphantly, trying not to smile. She fails miserably.

_I love you_, the paper proclaims in scrawly, barely legible handwriting. Rose chooses this exact moment to get very interested in her cake, not managing to see the message on the paper. A student sitting in front of her blushes. Donna spits out her tea.

The Doctor looks down at the paper and back up at Donna and the student, alarmed. _Not you!_

"What about me?" Jack calls, and this time Rose has no choice but to look up, curious.

_Well, maybe a little bit. You could be blonder, though._

Rose stares. Martha laughs and nudges her. "Go on. I think he wants to apologise."

"About time, too," Rose mutters unconvincingly, only waiting a second before jumping up from the table and running outside.

"You can say that again," Donna grumbles good-naturedly as the old couple applaud – the Doctor and Rose are kissing outside. "Next time they have a fight, we're locking them in that room full of giant rubber ducks 'til they start snogging or go completely bonkers, whatever happens first. I'm not doin' this again." She pulls a face at her mug. "I dunno what they put in this tea but it doesn't taste like water."

--

They're standing on the edge of a mountain on the planet where she first promised him forever. Theirs are still the only footsteps in the dust.

"I – "

Can he start it like that, though, really? After all this time, shouldn't it be something altogether bigger, grander? He'd thought the beauty of the planet would be enough but suddenly he feels like he needs to do more.

"Rose, I – "

She watches patiently while he, getting ever more frustrated and trying to slip it in between sporadic bouts of conversation, tries a further six times over the next hour or so. Before he can start the seventh, she slips her hand into his and squeezes his fingers, still looking straight ahead at the three-sunned dawn.

"I love you," she tells him simply, and he freezes, astounded – not just at what she'd said but at the ease with which she'd read him and done it. "An' you don't have to say it back."

He doesn't know what else to do but kiss her. Lying his coat out in the dust, they make love for the first time on that isolated mountain-top, the rays of the new sun almost a blessing on the chances they are taking, and he tells himself it's enough.

--

"What am I supposed to say?" Donna asks him incredulously as he sulks pitifully at her over his steaming mug of tea. "Rose, my mate fancies you?" She bobs from side to side in that funny way she does when she's making a point, and the Doctor realises that asking Donna to tell Rose that he loves her probably wasn't the most intelligent or well thought-out plan he's ever had.

He's giving up hope, though. He sighs. "I just don't know _how_…"

"He wants to hold your hand," Donna teases, putting on the voice of a child in the playground.

His mug on the table now, the Doctor shoots her an utterly bewildered look. "What's wrong with holding hands?"

Despairing, Donna rolls her eyes. "I can't tell her. She wants to hear it from you," she adds, more gently, as the Doctor slumps forward onto the table in defeat. "Look, I know you're an alien but you're such a bloke sometimes, and I know you don't talk about how you feel, I _know_, but this is Rose. She's not gonna tell you to buzz off back to Mars. What have you got, anyway? An allergy to the word love?"

"Sometimes I wonder."

--

A day later, he blurts it out while Rose is lying on a settee in the library, flipping through an alien fashion magazine and waving her legs lazily in the air behind her.

She stops humming to turn the page, not looking up. "That's nice," she says absently. "Reckon we've got any eggs left for lunch?"

The Doctor tries very, very hard not to bash his head against the doorframe.

--

"It's not like we haven't got the room," Donna protests when the Doctor walks into the TARDIS's large ballroom and immediately attempts to march straight back out again. Donna firmly grabs his arms and steers him back inside.

"Was this your idea?" he asks Jack resignedly, sneaking back towards the door before Sarah Jane, Martha, Tegan or Jo can spot him.

"With a little help…" Jack grins, putting an arm around Donna and then quickly retracting it in case she slaps him for giving her away.

The Doctor can only stare in horror as Peri and Ace start a conga line around the room. The YMCA begins to play.

Rose folds her arms. "What is this, Companion Party?" She peers into the crowd. "Blimey, how many of them are blonde?!" Martha, with a bottle of suspiciously alien-looking alcohol in her hand, seems to have noticed this too and is standing in the middle of the room counting the blondes as they go past in the conga line, but she forgets to turn with the line and loses count every time someone she's already spotted moves out of her sight.

"This isn't helping," the Doctor mutters to Donna through gritted teeth, knowing she is well aware of his attempts to tell Rose how he feels.

Donna matches each of his steps as he continues to back off, springing forwards and dropping a plastic cowboy hat onto his head. "Well sorry, Mr Grumpy Pants. Thought a party might cheer you up."

"I don't need – I didn't even know half these people were still alive!"

There's a high-pitched shriek from the other end of the room and a mass of ginger curls starts bounding towards him. Eyes wide, the Doctor grabs Rose's hand and makes a swift exit through the nearest door.

Donna pats the downcast-looking girl's shoulder. "Yeah, he does that. Nothing personal. I'm Donna, by the way. How long did you put up with Martian boy out there, then?"

Mel blinks at her. "He's… he's not from Mars."

Outside, after a few hot words on the number of women the Doctor has travelled with over the years, Rose is being swiftly mollified by his bumbling attempts at defending himself.

"I don't mind," she tells him eventually, putting a hand on his arm. "Not really. Not enough to fight about it, anyway."

The Doctor actually continues babbling for thirty seconds before he realises what she's said. "Oh! Good. I mean – " He takes a deep breath. "Rose, you know I – you _must _know – "

Martha chooses that moment to pop into the corridor and check he's not suffering from some sort of companion-related shellshock. She's got her stethoscope around her wrist and is listening to her own ear as she talks. Rose, oblivious, laughs and gently takes Martha's bottle away, making a mental note to tip all their alien alcohol down the sink.

He really thinks he might have said it this time, too.

--

It's almost too late and this time it really _is _his last chance because death is even more impossible than crossing the Void. She's lying in his lap, apologising for bleeding all over his suit ("You should've worn the brown one," she gasps, "Wouldn't show so much, then.") and all he can do is _watch _and kick himself for all the times he's tried and failed to tell her how much she means to him.

Now, facing losing her for a forever more certain than ever before, the words don't seem enough. They're not going to save her now. He _more _than loves her and she knows, oh, she _knows_, and how could he ever have doubted it?

He tells her anyway, whispers it over and over into her hair, rocking with her, refusing to believe she can no longer hear.

When Donna pulls him away, it's all he can do not to scream. Martha drops to the floor and pumps away uselessly at Rose's still heart and it takes the efforts of Jack and Donna combined to stop him returning to her body.

"I _loved _her," he screams, and Jack takes a step back, alarmed. "I loved her," he whispers, hoarse, and Donna pulls him to her, looking at Jack helplessly over her shoulder.

Martha sits back, trying not to cry, trying even harder not to shake her head at the still girl before her. "She knew." She brushes some of Rose's hair back, hand shaking. "We all knew."

--

He doesn't know how – sometimes he thinks he doesn't care – but she survives. He could have kissed Martha for giving it just one more go, for believing in _just in case_.

He didn't, just for the record. Rose probably wouldn't have liked that very much.

She's pale and weak and has lost far too much blood, but she's _alive_ and he couldn't ask for anything more. When she finally wakes up almost a week later, he lets out a shaky breath and clutches her hand tighter, dropping his head to the covers, but he's not the only one who's relieved. A teary Donna leaps forward and crushes them both and Martha happily bumps the Doctor out of the way to run a few checks while he stands at the foot of the bed with a considerably shaken Jack.

"I wanted to say it," he explains quietly, when the others have retreated to a huddled group by the door, trying to look busy. "But I felt like it wasn't enough anymore."

"Shut up," Rose tells him weakly, smiling.

"Alright," Donna pipes up from the other end of the room, marching over with her hands on her hips, no longer bothering to pretend she isn't listening. "That's enough of that nonsense. You love the Doctor."

Rose blinks up at her woozily and makes a noise that the Doctor thinks might be a question.

Donna shrugs and pulls a face. "That'll do. And he's crazy about you, he never shut up about you the whole time you were "lost" or wherever you were, so even though he's a great big prawn who chokes on his own tongue every time he tries to say it – "

"Oi, I object to that!" the Doctor says, indignantly.

"Object to it all you like, spaceman, it's true. You _love _her. So now if one of you gets hit by a bus or shot by a crazy bloke or, I dunno, eaten by a giant fish, you both know. Right?"

The Doctor and Rose say nothing, bewildered.

Donna narrows her eyes. "_Right_?"

"Right," the Doctor squeaks. "But… just so you know, there aren't any giant man-eating fish this side of the galaxy. Not unless you go to Capella, and I really don't think – "

It's Jack's turn to interrupt. He steps forward, looking mildly impatient. "Doctor?"

"Yes, Jack?"

"Do us a favour: shut up and kiss the girl before I do it for you."

He doesn't need telling twice.


End file.
